Sylvia Jones: "Dope Calisthenics" & Jane Lewty: "Vespers"

Join us for a reading and conversation with poets Sylvia Jones and Jane Lewty, sharing work from their new books. About Dope Calisthenics: Sylvia Jones's sophomore collection examines the pressure exerted on working-class Black life by spectacle, debt, inheritance, and the market's endless demand for performance. The poems move through Baltimore, television, retail language, protest remnants, and borrowed speech, tracking how public feeling hardens into product and how survival becomes a style others learn to consume. Class aspiration and class entrapment, the theater of mobility, and the material afterlife of slogans once the moment of display has passed all loom large as Jones asks what kind of consciousness repetition makes, and what remains when the shift ends and the bill arrives? Dope Calisthenics is a book about the psychic drills required to live inside scarcity while being told to call it possibility instead. About Vespers: Often called “evening prayer,” vespers is held around sunset. Its purpose: to give thanks for the day and offer a sacrifice of praise to God. In Jane Lewty’s Vespers, she superimposes the tropes of the Christian ritual onto a very different type of sacrifice—that of making art. Through nightly devotion, the speaker of these poems maps ritual until it degrades: the speaker as an obedient robot, a scribe-concubine, a centaur wearing skates, a poet seeking virtuosity and dexterity. Vespers asks: What if writing prompts are a bad idea? What if one cou…